My 24 year old landlady, the R&B rapper, Wangechi Waweru Mwende, survived a horrific car accident four years ago. Today she’s rebuilding her life and career without much fuss or desire to talk about either. I happen to have chosen the house she lives in with her Mom, Nancy Wangaru Migwi. The two share a modest… Read More
Try making judgements about human beings and groups and tribes and nations just by what you read in the media. Then, go out into the streets. Hire a bilingual Uber/Littlecub/Taxify driver in Nairobi to take you to Chinese-Kenyan construction sites, as I did. His name is Edward Njogu (the latter name in Kikuyu dialect means… Read More
I wrote the story on Indonesia’s attempts at natural disaster warning and prevention for Earth magazine last April, based on reporting I did in Indonesia in late December. Now with the Sulawesi quake and tsunami disaster, I print it below. The sheer unpredictability of quakes and tsunamis in a nation of 6000 inhabited islands spread… Read More
After staying in Nairobi 24 hours on no sleep, I took a flight to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to attend a conference entitled Africa-Asia: ‘A New Axis of Knowledge 2.’ The object was to learn about the region and run into contacts who might help me locate Chinese enclaves and business folks making interesting money… Read More
Dawn: Mwingi Rd., Kileleshwa, Nairobi. My Lufthansa flight -an Airbus A340-300 — touched down last night at 8:11 pm local time. It has taken me an entire summer to prepare for this day. I haven’t slept much. The cock is crowing. There was a slow-mo feel to the entire season of renting, interviewing, writing magazine… Read More
My Mom’s best friend, my surrogate mother growing up, was an opera singer named Maria Callas. No, not that Maria Callas, the tempestuous vocal genius and companion to Aristotle Onassis. This Maria Callas was altogether different — warm, gifted, fragile, yet steely strong. She passed into another life September 8 2017, and her daughter, Michele Morin, sent… Read More
[Read full story in Smithsonian.com] His reconstructed faces have tongues that taste and eyelids that blink. But will they withstand the test of time? [Dec. 9, 2016] There have been 38 facial transplants worldwide to date. Not all have survived. (Elnur / iStock) By Arielle Emmett SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 9, 2016 On September 5, 2001,… Read More
Harbin, Manchuria: Officials here seem reluctant to spotlight the Japanese germ warfare scientists and what they did to thousands of local inhabitants here in 1932 and beyond. Perhaps that’s the reason Harbin has built China’s greatest contemporary war museum, known formally as “The Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731,” in… Read More
I realize I never finished the story of Harbin, which I visited nearly a year ago. It began with my need to research this icy Russian-Jewish-Chinese enclave in Manchuria, home of the international ice festival, seat of the frigid Songhua River, intending to flesh out the frigid landscape for the novel I’m working on (interminably)… Read More
Just two blocks from my Charleston-style home on Bridges Farm Rd., I plunge almost every day into Lake Davidson, the horseshoe-shaped lake with the gooey clay bottom. On sunny days, when the water turns a pellucid blue-green, I swim as freely as the sparrows and Great Blue Herons swooping down from the trees. Immersed in… Read More